#184 Overcome Your Fears By Visualizing Success

Hey everyone. Hope you're having another great week. This week's topic is something that I don't always love talking about. Maybe it's something you don't love talking about, and that is the idea of fear. We all have them, we all deal with them. This week we're going to talk about how to use those fears to your advantage. Not run away from them, but to define them and utilize them to help you get closer to where you want to be. So stay tuned. Welcome to the Passive Income MD podcast where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe. Subscribe now. Let's get on with the show. So I have a quick question for you. What is the number one thing that keeps us from taking action? Another better way to say it is what is the number one thing that keeps us from achieving what we want in life? I think it's obvious I've set you up for it and you know the answer. It's fear. That four letter word, F, E, A, R. And it's a topic that I didn't particularly like talking about. If you talk to my wife, she thinks I don't have fears. And because I just go ahead and I do things that I want to do and I don't necessarily think about all of the consequences. The way her mind thinks is totally different from mine. She thinks about all the possibilities, everything that could go wrong but go right. I mean, she's great at assessing a whole picture and thinking about consequences. Me, on the other hand, she thinks I just go ahead and do what I want and take action and deal with the consequences later. And there's power to that as well. I mean, if I'm honest with myself, it's not that I don't think about fear. I do, but I probably just try to avoid it. And that's how I've been most of my life. There's something I'm fearful of and I don't think I can quickly or easily overcome it. I just avoid it altogether and do something else. I don't know if you've ever been like that before, but the way I thought about fear and my whole approach to it completely changed when I watched a TED talk by a man named Tim Ferriss. If you're not familiar with Tim Ferriss, he's the author of the Four Hour Workweek, the Four Hour Chef. He's somebody that's well known on YouTube and he's known for figuring out how to optimize and, and maximize things. In fact, people talk about life hacks. This is somebody who takes that to the next degree and thinks about how to do everything in the shortest period of time with max efficiency. He's a super intelligent guy. If you want to check out his material on YouTube and all that, I highly recommend it. He's got that great book as well, Four Hour Work Week. But he's also well known for having a TED Talk, which is probably one of the most popular TED talks of all time. It talks about really defining those fears and figuring out how to again approach those in a different way. So a lot of things that I'm going to talk about today started with his talk and I've reshaped things to, to make it make sense for me and maybe it'll be useful for you in some way. Now, when we think about fear, we have to all realize, number one, it's completely normal. We all have fears. It's abnormal when you don't have those fears. In fact, if you take certain drugs that take away some of those fear centers, then bad things tend to happen. We're actually wired to use fear to survive. Back in prehistoric early days, that fear center kept us from getting in trouble, from not just getting hurt, but, but from getting killed. Whether it's from a saber tooth tiger, a lion, or whatever beast it might be, there were things that were constantly threatening us as a person, as humanity. We had to figure out how to get past that. And so as healthcare professionals, we understand the whole sympathetic nerve system that takes over. We have a survival center that causes us to figure out how to flee. Our heart rate goes up, our focus gets narrowed, our vision gets narrowed, our blood pressure goes up. And it's all so that we can get out of a situation and deal with a situation as quickly as possible when there's danger. Now in today's world, we don't deal with a lot of those same dangers that we had deal with in the past, but today it shows up differently. It might show up as times of stress. We have to deal with things at home, with family, with money. These are the things that threaten our survival today. In fact, when I talk to investors, when I talk to entrepreneurs who are big members of our community, these are the top fears that tend to come up again and again and again. Let me know if you resonate with any of them. Number one, it's fear of failure. Number two, it's fear of financial loss, fear of reputational damage or losing that reputation. Fear of opportunity cost, fear of missing out, Fear of legal issues getting sued, fear of overwhelm, and lastly, fear of rejection. These are all real fears that we all deal with. Either we've dealt with all of them at all times, or sometimes we're dealing with one of these at a time. Now, if you want to take a quick think about it, which one of these resonates for you right now? Which is the one that gets your blood pressure up the most, that keeps you up at night? Now, whichever one it is for you, that probably it weighs on you the most right now, I can probably tell you that it threatens or keeps us from doing these things. It keeps us from taking action. You ever heard of analysis paralysis? Where you're so paralyzed just because you want to analyze a deal or a situation or an opportunity, and there's so much analysis that goes behind it? We all want to make sure we don't make a mistake, do no harm first risk benefit ratios, that it keeps you paralyzed from actually taking action. Some of us. I know I've been thinking about something, a situation, making a decision, and we're so worried about all the things that could go wrong or making sure that we do it perfectly, that we actually never even take action. I have a friend, for example, who I remember talking to about investing in real estate. He would say, look, I know it's important. I want to do this. I'm a physician. I'm worried about my future income, but I don't know what to do. Should I buy my own property? Should I invest in a syndication? Should I invest in debt? I don't know what to do. I look at all these deals, I'm not sure what to do. My encouragement to him was that there's no perfect action, meaning that you take what seems to be the most reasonable for you. You obviously do the most due diligence that you can do, try to do your best job, but at some point, you got to take action. There's always risk. Unfortunately, I talked to him three years later and he had done still zero. He hadn't progressed. And at that point, his job actually did change, meaning that private equity took over his practice and told them that they'd be taking a pay cut. Either that or they can move on. Now, I'm not saying that three years ago, if he had made the decision, all things would have been different, but he would have figured out, how else can I create a hedge? How else can I create other streams of income so that if something like this does happen, I can be prepared. But unfortunately, the fear kept him from making any sort of decision. And he was in the same place, if not worse place, three years later.

Over the last 35 years, MLG Capital, they focused on making smart investments in real estate and building relationships with their investors. They call it an investor centric fund structure. That's what they focus on where accredited investors, they can invest their money with confidence in funds that target diversification. They prioritize cash flow as well as.

Low leverage with a, what they call.

A unit unique dual sourcing strategy. So if you're unsure about investing due to rising inflation or volatility in the.

Stock markets, well, I want to let.

You know that investing real estate, it's been historically one of the best hedges against inflation. In fact, I've been investing with this company for years.

So if you're a medical professional and.

You'D like to learn more about investing with MLG Capital, make sure you visit passiveincomemd.com MLG Again, that's Passive Income MD.

Now back to the show number two. It might keep us from scaling or diversifying. If you have a business you want to scale, you want to grow this thing, you want to go into other areas. If you're an investor, you want to learn how to diversify, learn other asset classes, get your money working in different areas. So if the market's down in one area, then you have other areas that continue to bring that whole investment up. But if you're scared, you, you're scared of making new investments, learning something new, venturing into new opportunities, then you might not ever do that. You might not grow that business, you might not grow those investments. Next, it might keep you from innovating or adapting. Meaning that all businesses and people in general, we need to learn to innovate, we need to grow. We're not meant to stay at the status quo. Your business is not meant to stay at the status quo. Your practice is not meant to stay the same. There's a concept called constant and never ending improvement where we need to continue to grow and progress. Otherwise competition gets you. Otherwise you stay in old technologies, otherwise you stay in old paradigms that don't work. Moving forward, you can't adapt, you can't move quickly with what's going on. Fear might keep you from doing that. How many of you know a business that was out there that you thought was unconquerable, meaning that it was going to be there for a lifetime that is non existent today or declared bankruptcy? Great example of that is Blockbuster Video. How many of us used to go to Blockbuster Video for games, for movies it was like a weekend trip for myself and my family every single weekend. No one knew that there was this thing called Netflix that was coming down the line, streaming that was coming down. In fact, you probably heard that story. Or Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix for pennies on the dollar and they said, absolutely not, they didn't need it. And now the tables have been turned. Netflix is still going. It's huge. And Blockbuster is down to their very last store. From what I've heard, you know, that's a case where they just didn't see the future. But maybe fear of change for them moving into that online space, the streaming kept them from being able to do that. How many of us are doing that with our own jobs, our own businesses, our own investing? Next, it might keep us from getting external feedback. How many of us are scared to talk to somebody about this, about talking to somebody about an investment? We're scared of what they'll think about us. We're scared of looking stupid. We're scared of making a dumb decision. And we don't try to get external feedback on our businesses and our investments. We don't talk to enough people. I think something we do at Passive Income MD really well is, is we create communities where we create a safe space to talk about entrepreneurship, whether that's through our leverage and growth community, or we talk about investments to our Passive Real Estate Academy and our Platinum Investor Club. The goal of these communities is to make this a team sport. We shouldn't be in this alone. And we need each other to do better. None of us are recreating the wheel. It's been done before, and many of us have experiences that we could share with other people. But sometimes the fear of just talking to other people keeps us from doing that. And so we end up repeating mistakes that we could learn from other people. So we don't go out there and we don't get external feedback with that. Then we don't end up collaborating. Sometimes there's opportunities to work together with people. Many people fear partnerships. Oh, it's going to all go wrong. And I've talked about that before on the blog. How to make sure that you create thriving partnerships where you're totally aligned, where your interests are aligned, so you can trust each other. But maybe fear, you've heard of bad stories in the past where partnerships have gone bad so you don't actually go out there and try to collaborate with people. And lastly, fear keeps us from managing risk effectively, meaning that we actually don't see the true risk. For example, When I talk to people about investing in real estate, many people don't get into it. They talk about this story. Oh, my friend, my uncle, had this bad experience, and because of that, that fear has made the risk huge, way beyond the point of the benefit, where it doesn't make sense. But how many of us look at the fear from an objective standpoint, actually look at, define it, what is true and what's not about that risk? What percentage chance is there of that benefit, of actually doing well, of making money from that investment, of doing well from launching that business, versus what is the downside and what is the true probability of that? So I don't know if any of this stuff has resonated with you. I know it has been for me. I deal with all those fears all the time. When I've started my businesses, when I decided to take a break from medicine, when I decided to start investing in real estate, when I started to start a real estate company, all of these fears would come in. So I started looking for ways to overcome my fear. And. And just like anything else, I looked for people who had been able to overcome fear and do well and perform. And I wanted to learn from the wisdom of them. And one place I found that was in a group of philosophers. They're known as the Stoics. So I'm going to finish this part of the podcast by talking about who they are, what they believe in, and in the next podcast, we're going to talk about some of the techniques they use that you can utilize to help you overcome these fears, to define them and use it to your advantage to do better in business and investing. So I'm talking about the Stoics. And for all of us, we have an idea of what it means to be stoic. We probably have some sort of image in our minds what it means to be steadfast, to be rock steady in times of stress, and when we all want that. Who wouldn't want to be stoic in those moments? Probably there are some characters from movies that you've seen that are completely stoic in the moment, in the face of stress. Usually I think of movies like Gladiator or things like that where just everything seems to be raining down on you and that person figures out how to overcome that, doesn't lose their cool and defeats the enemy. Well, this philosophy is handed down from. Even back in the Roman days, there are famous Stoics and you can look them up. Their names are Seneca, Marcus Aurelius. In today's age, the modern day Stoic is known as Ryan Holiday. So if you look up any of their stuff, you can see some of their philosophy in the ways they believe. And they've all left behind journals and books for us to learn from them. If you're looking for something a little different to read, Marcus Aurelius has a great book called Meditations. He was a Roman emperor at the height of the Roman Empire, and that book is all about his daily meditations. It's basically his journal for how he keeps it all together. Obviously, he's in a stressful position and he talks about how he thinks through that and if he can think through how to remain calm, under control in the time of the Roman Empire, I mean, couldn't we do that as well too in what we're dealing with? Ryan Holiday has also amazing book called the Obstacle is the Way where he sees all things that are in our way, barriers, obstacles, as the way to get what you want to learn from that, to build on top of each other. And we've talked about that in the podcast as well. How if we look back at times in history where things might have seemed the most difficult, might have seen the biggest challenge, and in the moment, it looked like the worst thing or felt like the worst thing that was happening to us. But when we look back at it years later, we realize it's possibly the best thing that has ever happened to us. That happened to me when I became a partner at work and I wasn't given all the terms that I was expecting. I thought I was getting screwed. And so it forced me to look at other streams of income, other ways to create a hedge outside of medicine, which, looking back, was the best thing that ever happened to me. Has there been ever been a situation like that in your life? Also, there's one modern day stoic that I think all of us probably know. Maybe we don't think of him as a stoic, but he's somebody that actually follows the stoic philosophy to a degree and he puts it out in films and movies. And that person's signature line is this. Guess who it is. All right, all right, all right. Did I do a good job? Anyways, everyone knows that's Matthew McConaughey. He knows he's one of the most famous people today that follow that type of philosophy. And this is the philosophy and this is what they believe in. Stoicism is about figuring out what you can control versus what you can't. They look at every situation, and in every situation, there are things that you can control as a person. And there are things that you can't control, so they focus on what you can control, which can probably improve outcomes for you. They accept what they can't control because you can't do anything about it anyway. So it doesn't help you to stress about it. But the things that you can to change the outcome, they focus on that and go full force on that. Now that's something that we could all learn from. When there's stress at work, when there's stress at home, when there's financial stress, we probably spend more of our energies focusing on what we can control versus what we can. If we can quickly figure that out and get better at this, how much more productive would our lives be? How much better could we get ourselves out of certain situations? So those are my thoughts for this week. Before letting this podcast get too long, next week we're going to talk about some of the techniques you can use and some of the some of the strategies that I found are most effective in taking these fears and using it to your advantage. Hope this has been helpful and we'll see you in the next episode. Have a great week. Take care. Enjoy the show. Let me know by dropping a review in the podcast app you're listening to us in. And if you haven't already, make sure to hit subscribe. Join thousands of physicians who are also on this journey to creating their ideal lives through multiple streams of income. Learn more at our website, passiveincomemd.com thanks again for allowing me to be a part of your journey. See you next time.